The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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allow for a free exchange of a single copy of each newspaper between printers, thus
encouraging a free flow of news and increasing the intercolonial nature of
newspapers. 77 By 1763, there were monthly packet ships from London carrying
mail and overland couriers from Philadelphia through the southern colonies to
Charleston. This important inter-colonial connection now meant that regular mail
service between the colonies no longer had to travel all the way to England and
back. By 1775, there was a weekly courier south from Philadelphia through the
Chesapeake region to South Carolina. 78 Private letters and public news were
traveling at much greater speeds than they were just a half-century earlier. By the
time of the political crisis of the Stamp Act in 1765, the Virginia newspaper was
reporting what happened in Boston, Providence, and New York just three and four
weeks after it occurred, without the news having first to travel through England.
While the speed of shipping to and from England remained constant, the
intercolonial mails improved: what used to take six months now took just weeks. 79
The improvement of postal delivery within the American colonies is a key to the
changes that were happening within the newspapers and overall colonial culture. By
the 1750s, the newspapers included more material from the other colonies, creating
stronger ties between the people of those once-distant and separate colonies. Until
direct and speedy communication was established, there could have been no shared
sense of crisis and no American unity or nation could have been imagined. 80
77 Brown, “Post, Postmasters, and Newspapers,” 4-5.
78 Journal kept by Hugh Finlay, Surveyor of the Post Roads on the Continent of North
America, 1773-1774 (Brooklyn: Norton, 1867), quoted in Smith, “The Colonial Post Office,”
273.
79 Middleton, Maritime History, 7. Also verified by this research examining dates of stories in
the Chesapeake gazettes.
80 Anderson in Imagined Communities referred to newspapers and novels as “print as
commodity.” He understood how such printed works were essential to tying people together with
a shared common language. He did not explore how an efficient post office would also bring that
sense of commonality and community, and was crucial to the functioning of a newspaper.